In case you thought Google was going to have all the fun in trying to draw users away from Microsoft Office, IBM has decided to jump into the fray by offering up its own free set of office productivity tools. IBM Lotus Symphony was launched along side of Google Presently (the presentation tools discussed in the story below) and is based on the Open Office code base. The suite comes with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application. This marks the fourth major entry ...
Rounding out its online browser-based office productivity suite, Google today launched its presentation building tool, a competitor now to Microsoft PowerPoint. The tool will let you build out a complete presentation slide set which is accessible to any PC with an Internet connection. On top of that, the application will import and export to the PowerPoint file format. Probably the greatest strength of this new presentation tool is the collaboration features already in Google Do...
And we're back to another fun-filled week of skins, wallpapers, forum feuds and tech news. Since it's Monday, my to-do list is telling me it's time for another weekly poll. Last week it was all about getting your feedback on the WinCustomize Personal Pages feature, to see how they rated and whether or not they could use improvement in the future. Turns out that the vast majority of you that use them think they're pretty good overall. Here's a quick breakdown: I love ...
In this post-bubble web world, if you don't pay too much attention you might be under the impression that there aren't many startups anymore trying to invent the Next Big Thing online. Or that venture capital, burned through like it was going out of style in the 90s, had dried up for good. Well, if you think the party ended back in 2001, you'd be wrong. It may have hit a slump, but the startup world seems to be alive and well, and more organized than ever. Enter TechCrunch...
Media Center devices have been all the rage the last few years. Tivo, home-built DVRs, Windows Media Center Edition, the list goes on. However, if you don't already have a device to do your TV and movie management, you're looking at a pretty hefty cash investment. Even if you have a spare PC sitting around, chances are you're looking at $300 or more in additional hardware to bring it up to snuff for media center usage. But what if you have an old Xbox sitting around? ...
Hey, look at that, it's Friday already! Well, after yet another fun-filled and busy week we're winding down for the weekend. So, like every week we bring you the peddler of false-hopes, snake oil, and Florida swampland... Island Dog and his weekly round-up of what's hot in the WinCustomize community for the last 7 days. As fall takes hold, we're starting to see activity pick up again in submissions and this week ID found some great skins to highlight. There's a CursorXP the...
The iPhone was all the rage just a few short months ago. It was sleek, sexy, and a huge step forward in the "i" line of products. The question was, would these improvements make it to the iPod? Well, at Apple's recent press event a week or so ago, we found out they would in the iPod Touch. Think of it as an iPhone, but without the phone component. The new device comes in 8gb an 16gb varieties and looks almost identical to its phone sibling. PC Magazine has the f...
If you're running a non-genuine copy of Windows Vista, expect something very unpleasant in the upcoming weeks/months. Microsoft is activating a function in your PC which, if you're found to be running a non-genuine copy of Vista, the OS will go into "Reduced Functionality Mode", disabling the PC for all intents and purposes. What will this feature look like in practice? A black screen after 1 hour of use No start menu or task bar No desktop This is probably the most aggressi...
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that manages to generate more controversy than perhaps is warranted, has hit a massive milestone in its relatively long life: the 2 millionth user-written entry. On Monday, The English Wikipedia site hit the 2 million mark with the article "El Hormiguero" detailing a Spanish TV show. It took 6 years to reach this point, which means the encyclopedia has received, on average, 913 new articles per day. Pretty impressive overall, and while the syste...
Productivity studies are all the rage these days. Take your employees, figure out their exact time usage for any number of tasks, figure out the cost based on their salary and other factors of those activities and try and assign an overall cost to work tasks and frivolous endeavors. Chances are, everyone wastes a certain amount of time every day, which isn't so bad on a case-by-case basis, but what happens when you start looking at a larger pool of workers? Well, a study was done...
One of the most severe criticisms leveled against the Apple iPhone was that it was locked down to AT&T, one of the least popular of all US cell phone service providers. Poor customer service, spotty coverage, and the slowest data network of the major carriers are just a few of AT&T's major downsides, which left people scratching their heads over Apple making them the exclusive partner. As was reported widely last month, folks figured out how to unhook the iPhone from AT&T and co...
Jay Levy went to the mailbox one day to find a 54-page bill from AT&T covering his family's three iPhones. Now an absurdly long bill printout from AT&T isn't anything new, but this one had a twist. A $4,800 price tag. What happened? Well Jay and his family went on a Mediterranean cruise not too long ago, and they had their three iPhones with them. Now, they knew if they used the phones overseas, they'd incur massive charges so the phones were turned off for the entire...
WindowBlinds 6 is a big deal for us here at Stardock. It represents a major step forward in skinning and what artists can achieve in a skin. Animations, transparency and blur effects, and more. Coupled with SkinStudio 6, WindowBlinds 6 is something we're all very excited about here. To that end, we've been working up a lot of informational content to let you know exactly what WB6 is about any why it's something to get excited about. Island Dog has continued his outsta...
Poll time again folks! Previously, I asked everyone what their favorite skinning application was, giving a range of choices from WindowBlinds to ObjectBar (and the ever-popular "Other"). Well, after 2 weeks of voting, the results are in, and the winner by a huge margin is WindowBlinds. I mean, it wasn't even close. The next closest app in terms of votes received was ObjectDock which didn't even get a quarter of the votes WindowBlinds did. Even "Other" which could h...
You have your profile on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn. A personal page here at WinCustomize, on DeviantArt, Skinning.net and elsewhere. You also have your email address, instant messaging accounts, maybe a personal page somewhere, and countless forum accounts scattered across the Internet. You're online identity is a tangled mess of half-completed, often out of date profiles dotting the online landscape. While a lot of ink is spent on concerns over regular identity theft (so...